1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an electronic shelf label system and a method of operating the same.
2. Description of the Related Art
In accordance with the development of tag technology and local area wireless communications, various systems based on tags have been provided. As one system based on tags, there is provided an electronic shelf label system, which has been variously used in environments such as hypermarkets, or the like, providing various products at any time.
The electronic shelf label system may be provided by building a wireless personal area network based on local area wireless technology such as Zigbee, or the like. Such a wireless personal area network needs to be operated in a limited frequency band since it is difficult to use a frequency band that has been already allocated. Therefore, the electronic shelf label system using the wireless personal area network also has a limitation due to the limited frequency band available for the use thereof.
For example, the electronic shelf label system may include a gateway wirelessly providing data from a server and an update tag displaying product information, or the like, based on the data provided by the gateway, wherein the gateway and the update tag have a wakeup channel and a data channel in common.
In addition, the electronic shelf label system uses a plurality of gateways in order to cover a wide area. In the case of the data channel, the plurality of gateways may share and use a single frequency band in common; however, in the case of the wakeup channel, the plurality of gateways may not share and use a single frequency band in common. That is, in the case in which the plurality of gateways and a plurality of update tags associated with the plurality of gateways use a single wakeup channel, there is a limitation in that it is highly likely that a collision in data transmission may occur.
In order to overcome this limitation, the wakeup channel has recently been formed by allocating a frequency to each of the plurality of gateways. However, in this case, there remains a problem in terms of a limitation in the number of frequencies that may be allocated within a predetermined area, the possibility of interference between adjacent frequencies, and the like.
The following Related Art Documents, which relate to the above-mentioned related art, do not disclose a solution to the limitation of the frequency band described above.